Michael Beschloss - Michael Beschloss on the Cold War: The Crisis Years, Mayday, and At the Highest Levels

Michael Beschloss on the Cold War

The Crisis Years, Mayday, and At the Highest Levels

Michael Beschloss

CONTENTS

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The Crisis Years Copyright 1991 by Michael R. Beschloss

Mayday Copyright 1986 by Michael R. Beschloss

At the Highest Levels Copyright 1993 by Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5668-7

This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10038

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MICHAEL BESCHLOSS

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

About the Author

Michael Beschloss is a historian and the New York Timesbestselling author of nine books, including Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1980); Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (1986); The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 19601963 (1991); The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitlers Germany (2002); and Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 17891989 (2007). Born in Chicago and educated at Williams College and Harvard University, Beschloss is a contributor to NBC News, PBS NewsHour, and the New York Times, and has been called the nations leading presidential historian by Newsweek. He lives with his wife in Washington, DC.

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The Crisis Years

Kennedy and Khrushchev, 19601963

For Afsaneh Mashayekhi

PREFACE

This volume examines the relationship of John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev and its impact on the Cold War. Why did these two leaders, who both came to power with genuine hopes of reducing the harshness of Soviet-American relations, take humankind instead to the edge of nuclear disaster and into the most ferocious arms race in world history?

The book benefits from new scholarship and new information on the Kennedy-Khrushchev period. Like every scholar, I stand on the shoulders of many others and am happy to here express my debt to all of those who have gone before me. Recent years have seen the opening of the majority of John Kennedys papers bearing on the Soviet Union and of other archives shedding light on his relations with Nikita Khrushchev. American political, military, and intelligence officials of the period have become more willing to be interviewed at length about sensitive aspects of their service. Thanks to a Harvard group, Soviet and American officials and historians have gathered to reexamine the crises over Berlin and Cuba.

In my last book, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair, expectations that at last historians can write with equal access to Soviet and American sources. This book does benefit from hundreds of oral and written reminiscences by Soviet figures that were not until recently available. These expand our knowledge and understanding of Soviet decision-making.

Still I have used them with considerable self-restraint, for they are subject to the same partisan motives, faulty memories, and other limitations that distort Western oral history and memoir. Unlike in the West, we do not yet have access to a substantial number of contemporaneous official Soviet documents that might help us to better judge their accuracy. Until the Soviet government opens its classified archives to Western scholars, volumes such as this one must be more tentative in their treatment of the Soviet than the Western side. Until that time, no scholar can aspire to write a fully comprehensive or reliable history of any portion of the Cold War.

Information is not the only ingredient vital to historiography. So is the passage of time. It is difficult to think of two leaders whose reputations have oscillated more wildly in three decades than those of Khrushchev and Kennedy. The distance of thirty years allows us to look at both men with greater dispassion.

The end of the Cold War enables us to study that dangerous half century not as an earlier phase of current politics but as a discrete epoch. By exploiting the assets of retrospect and increasing information, historians in both East and West can begin to work toward consensus on the overarching questions of why that epoch started, why it ended, and how to prevent another such tragic and costly struggle.

M ICHAEL R. B ESCHLOSS

Washington, D.C.

March 1991

Harper & Row, 1986, p. xvi.

CHAPTER 1

Almost Midnight

On Sunday morning, October 14, 1962, John Fitzgerald Kennedy awoke at the Penn Sheraton Hotel in Pittsburgh, there to campaign for Democrats running in the 1962 elections. He did not know it yet, but this was the eve of a military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that was potentially the most dangerous ever.